


Breaking Light

by halotolerant



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Caretaking, Dark Past, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-09
Updated: 2014-02-09
Packaged: 2018-01-11 17:57:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1176132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Sansa’s known kindness. It’s the sparkle on a serpent’s scales before it turns and strikes you. Giving means taking, in its time, she’s no child and she understands that now.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breaking Light

**Author's Note:**

> For the Porn Battle prompt: Edmund/Sansa Stark, summer, warmth, regret

Sometimes the memories twist and fester so deep in her gut that she’ll run, out of the fine Cair Paravel banqueting hall, out and down the great wide stone stairs and to the sea, and vomit, and cry and scream at the gulls. 

He leaves her alone, but somehow when it passes, when she’s just thinking of stumbling back again, acid-tongued and trembling, he’ll be standing there, on the sand, holding a cloak and a small flask of honeyed wine and water. 

Sansa’s known kindness. It’s the sparkle on a serpent’s scales before it turns and strikes you. Giving means taking, in its time, she’s no child and she understands that now. 

But he hasn’t taken, not yet. King Edmund attends to her, with his small gifts and his few words and his strange, sad expression, as if he really sees her and all the dark, broken pain nursed in her heart, and asks nothing in return. 

His price, when it comes, must be the higher for waiting, she’s sure of that, and so she tries to have ready her defence. She makes herself beautiful each night in her rooms, brushing out her hair, carefully placing her borrowed diadems (his sisters are generous and laughing and tactile, she shies away from them, she’s learnt better than to trust those falsehoods anymore). And in the evenings she sits at his side, soft and ready with a compliment, a word, a lowered gaze, and hopes that perhaps she may twist back even a little power for herself. That he will see her not so much as a castaway upon his kingdom, the victim of a shipwreck with no friends or family, no house or home, nothing but her beauty and her nightmares to her name. 

Edmund is not truly the king, not the High King, or so she has been told. The High King is his brother, away in the North doing battle. 

Sansa can only hope this High King dies quietly on a giant’s sword. Else he’ll march south again and then it will all begin - the rumours and whispers and scheming, the sharpenings. There cannot be two Kings of any realm; you do not need to be clever to know that. 

Edmund says he misses this Peter, but then he would. Any man would want the power for himself, that much can be easily assumed. Sansa has been more alert to the sighings of Queen Susan. Susan might raise a second army in Peter’s support, could easily marry into significant power. 

If Susan would ever marry, whilst Peter lived. Susan is Peter’s sister, but Sansa is not a child, not anymore, she knows what may happen, and she has seen Susan’s sighing and the sadness in her eyes when the dancing starts, and the way she will not take the hand of any man. 

Lucy is small and dark and determined, and likely to be found outside, in borrowed breeches, conversing with animals. Sansa cannot bear spending much time with her; in every move of Lucy’s adult body, she sees a little sister who died too soon.

And a brother, and another brother, and another. Death running after her family, and she the last, and sometimes she wishes it was over, herself finished and slain and finally quiet. 

And sometimes she wakes with the dawn, feeling like she could eat the power of the sun and take more, and she wants to fight, in the way that she can, in the only way she has. 

“My Lord,” she will greet Edmund, dropping to a curtsey, rising, smiling, letting herself blush, willing him to...

...sometimes she forgets to be cautious. She forgets to mistrust him. He seems not to mind her at his side, and takes her with him as he rides out about his kingdom, saying little but smiling, and shows her nests of baby birds and high mountains and the markets of the centaurs and the dances of the dryads and she, riding at his side, will smile and lose herself in sunshine. 

Sometimes, for days at a time, she can be happy. 

And then the bile rises, horror and fear together, and she knows the world cannot be kind or safe for anyone, and it is never summer for long, and curses herself for believing. 

One day, in a glade in the deep forest, she tries to kiss him, because better that it be over, the fantasy ended, the waiting ceased and the reality returned. Better that he take her on a day she feels strong and ready for it, and as if she has the blood in her veins to live on afterwards. 

For a moment, he kisses back. Uncertain, perhaps, but soft. He tastes of the fruits he has been plucking down from the trees for them both, and his hand cupping her face is sword-callused and smooth and warm, and something in her belly goes taught and hollow. 

It may not be so bad. 

But then he pulls away – he does not want her, she has not even that power here. 

His eyes are dark, sorrowful. 

“You do not know what I am. What I was.” These are the words he says, as if he read them from her own heart, and for a moment she almost thinks he mocks her. 

He sighs. “When my brother returns, see then... I would not have you choose a King only to regret your choice mere weeks later. You are... I will give what I can but you are...” and he stops speaking and dismounts from his horse, walking away from her a short distance, returning with a handful of hazelnuts. 

“Try these,” he says, softly, holding up his hand. 

She looks at the brown casings. “Nuts and fruit,” she says, as lightly as she can. “Winter is coming.”

“Not here,” he tells her, smiling somewhat now. “Things are, here, a little different.” There is gladness in his face and sorrow - that same pinched sorrow and regret which at times she sees in own eyes, gazing back accusingly from her mirror. 

And perhaps this is why she catches up his hand, and holds it, for a moment. 

“I see that, I think,” she says. “And if I do not know what you are, I confess I do not know who I am, either, not anymore.”

There in the green forest light, in the stillness, they wait, touching, silent, peaceful. A bird sings gently in the trees, and perhaps the sun will shine on, and there will be all the time in the world. 

 


End file.
